Jokers' Pursuit of Truth: Critical Policy Analysis in the Age of Spectacle and Post-Truth Politics

Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce unequal social structures presents many challenges. These challenges are amplified by the politics of spectacle, where duplicity comes to dominate how educational policies are conceptualized, presented to the public, and subsequently enacted. The pursuit of truth in policy proposals or reform designs often entails navigating contentious spaces of fiction-making, fakery, and duplicitous performances, sometimes involving researchers themselves. Drawing on Bakhtin's writing on jokers' pursuit of truth, I revisit the tensions I encountered in my ethnographic fieldwork in the Russian Federation to reimagine the possibilities of navigating research with the powerful. This paper offers a methodological provocation to rethink ethical imperatives and poses new questions for reimaging the problematics of critical policy analysis focused on equity and justice in the post-truth era.